ENGLISH LITERATURE 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Chatter-ton's Rowley Poems, in 

 Goldsmith, and in Cowper's The 

 Task. It is broken up in the songs 

 of William Blake, mystical poet 

 and painter, Songs of Innocence, 

 Songs of Experience, and in the 

 Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and 

 Coleridge. 



The long poetical career of 

 William Wordsworth was run in the 

 fervour of imaginative and mys- 

 tical insight into the life of nature 

 and its significance for the soul of 

 man, to which he had attained 

 through the meditative country 

 life of his youth and the spiritual 

 aaitations 'of the French Revolu- 

 tion. The Prelude, The Excursion, 

 The Recluse, fragments of a never- 

 completed autobiography and 

 spiritual creed in blank verse ; 

 lyrical and narrative poems in- 

 spired by nature, childhood, the 

 peasant, the affections , patriotic 

 sonnets, have one common theme, 

 and are composed in a style which 

 Wordsworth was disposed to make 

 something of a religion too bald 

 and prosaic and even awkwardly 

 pompous when inspiration fails, at 

 its best unique in passionate, im- 

 aginative simplicity. Coleridge's 

 best poetry shows the influence of 

 Wordsworth in thought and feel- 

 ing and style, but what is most in- 

 dividual in The Ancient Mariner, 

 Christabel, Kubla Khan, is not 

 these Wordsworthian qualities, but 

 the magic with which the reawak- 

 ened sense of beauty and mystery 

 is expressed in phrase and in 

 subtle music of vowel and con- 

 sonant and cadence. 



Poetry of Scott and Byron 



The spirit and art of Words- 

 worth's and Coleridge's poetry were 

 too novel and elusive for immediate 

 appreciation. Public taste had to 

 be stimulated and purged by the 

 more crudely romantic poetry of 

 Walter Scott, Byron, and Thomas 

 Moore. Scott's stirring but some- 

 what rococo lays are of less pure 

 poetic worth than the delightful 

 snatches of song in which he re- 

 vived the impersonal, chivalrous 

 note of medieval lyric. The fiery, 

 brilliant, crude improvisations of 

 Byron in lyric and lay, and the 

 blend of description and rhapsody 

 in Childe Harold are the unre- 

 flective, potent expression of the 

 spirit of pure revolt in romanticism, 

 but Byron's best work was satire in 

 conversational style and ottava 

 rima, Beppo, Don Juan, and The 

 Vision of Judgment. 



Scott and Byron enjoyed a 

 European reputation. They are 

 the most human and worldly of the 

 poets of the period ; there is more 

 passionate flesh and blood in 

 Byron's technically inferior work 

 than in the work of any of our poets 



save Shakespeare and Burns. The 

 "desire of the moth for the star" 

 is the burden of the lyrical dramas, 

 Prometheus Unbound and Hellas, 

 rhapsodies as Alastor, and elegiac 

 poems as Adonais, and the songs in 

 winged and ethereal rhythms of 

 Percy Bysshe Shelley. Beauty, the 

 beauties of nature, of Spenser's 

 poems, of medieval chivalry, of 

 Greek mythology and art, of Mil- 

 tonic cadences and Shakespearean 

 phrases, are the theme and inspira- 

 tion of the Endymion and later 

 poems and odes of John Keats. 

 The curiously carved Gebir, Hel- 

 lenics and Lyrics of Walter Savage 

 Landor are inspired by a like sense 

 of the statuesque beauties of Greek 

 poems and epigrams and by a finer 

 scholarship, if a less spontaneous 

 creative genius. 



The Revolutionary Novel 



The last great novelist in the 

 18th century school of manners 

 and character was Jane Austen, 

 whose Northanger Abbey was an 

 early skit on the new romantic 

 novel. Her exquisite pictures of 

 genteel English life in the country 

 and at Bath include Pride and 

 Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion. 

 But the novel, too, came under the 

 influence of the taste for romantic 

 scenery, a medieval atmosphere, 

 the marvellous and mysterious, 

 dreams of the perfectibility of 

 human nature and political re- 

 generation. The result is seen in 

 revolutionary novels as William 

 Godwin's Caleb Williams ; didactic 

 stories like Thomas Day's Sand- 

 ford and Merton and Miss Edge- 

 worth's tales ; Mrs. RadclifiVs tales 

 of mysterious adventures, The 

 Mysteries of Udolpho ; crude ex- 

 periments in historical fiction as 

 Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, Clare 

 Reeve's The Old English Baron, 

 Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs. 

 Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent 

 and other tales extended the study 

 of manners to the Irish gentry 

 and peasants. 



These and the historical stories 

 are interesting now only or mainly 

 as marshalling the way to the great 

 achievement in the Waverley 

 Novels, from Waverley to Count 

 Robert of Paris, of Sir Walter 

 Scott, who combined and har- 

 monised the interest in character 

 and manners of the great 18th 

 century novelists, the romantic 

 passion for other times and other 

 manners and for a picturesque 

 setting in scenery rich in historical 

 associations, and that respect and 

 affection for the peasantry which 

 had grown steadily throughout the 

 18th century from Thomson and 

 Gray to Rousseau and Burns and 

 Wordsworth. 



The influence of the romantic 



movement on prose work other 

 than the novel can be studied 

 in the picturesque, archaically 

 coloured prose essays and Eliza- 

 bethan critical studies of Charles 

 Lamb, Essays of Elia, Specimens 

 from the Dramatic Poets ; in the 

 vivid, passionate, impressionistic 

 essays and criticism of William 

 Hazlitt, Lectures on the English 

 Poets, Lectures on the English 

 Comic Writers ; in the cadenced 

 prose, musical and fanciful, of 

 Thomas De Quincey, The Con- 

 fessions of an Opium Eater ; and in 

 the pleasant chat about letters and 

 art and scenery of Leigh Hunt, 

 The Examiner, etc. William Cob- 

 bett's racy, idiomatic prose, Rural 

 Rides, continues the tradition of 

 South and Swift. 



The poetry of the reign of Queen 

 Victoria is a continuation and 

 elaboration of the romantic re- 

 vival. The chief themes are the 

 same Nature, the romantic past, 

 medieval and classical, the prob- 

 lems of life and death. There is 

 less of the suggestion of a prophetic 

 burden (that is taken over by prose 

 writers like Carlyle and Ruskin) 

 than in Wordsworth and Shelley, 

 more of consciously artistic hand- 

 ling, of antiquarian accuracy of 

 reproduction, of analysis and in- 

 quiry, of dramatic interest which, 

 except in Scott, had been some- 

 what overshadowed by the large 

 topics Nature and Liberty and 

 Romance. The purification of 

 style, the rejection of a stereotyped 

 convention in poetic diction, had 

 led to an enrichment of phrase- 

 ology, a more imaginative style that 

 owes much to older poets, and in 

 the elaboration of which Keats is 

 a principal agent, and Keats's influ- 

 ence is obvious in all the Victorians. 

 Tennyson and Browning 



The most representative poet is 

 Alfred Tennyson, whose careful 

 experiments in the artistic expres- 

 sion of moods culminated in the 

 two volumes of 1842, lyrics and 

 idylls of nature and English rural 

 life, of character, Simon Stylites 

 and Ulysses, of medieval and 

 classical legend, and of the prob- 

 lems of sin and death and immor- 

 tality, The Vision of Sin. In the 

 years which followed the style thus 

 studied and mastered became the 

 medium of longer, more ambitious, 

 not always entirely successful 

 poems, The Princess, In Memoriam, 

 Idylls of the King, jewelled settings 

 of tales from Malory and the 

 Mabinogion, touched with modern 

 feeling. Tennyson's later ballads 

 and idylls reflect with great but 

 unequal power his passionate 

 patriotism and the trouble of soul 

 with which he contemplated the 

 changing spirit of his age. 



